Public Administration

I published a new DIE-GDI Briefing Paper today on how digital tools can be used by donors, and refugees themselves, to manage and support safe resettlement processes. Feel free to share, and expect the German-language version in the next week or so!

I watched from a distance on Twitter as the World Bank hosted its annual data event. I would love to have attended - the participants were a pretty amazing collection of economists, data professionals and academics. This tweet seemed to resonate with a theme I've been focused on the last week or so: There is … Continue reading Where Are the Legislators (Who Ostensibly Pay for Data)?

I published a post yesterday about how administrative data is produced. In the end I claimed that data gathering is an inherently political process. Far from being comparable, scientifically standardized representations of general behavior, public data and statistics are imbued with all the vagaries and unique socio-administrative preferences of the country or locality that collects … Continue reading How is Public Data Produced (Part 2)

The 2016 Global Peace Index (GPI) launched recently. Along with its usual ranking of most to least peaceful countries it included a section analyzing the capacity for the global community to effectively measure progress in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically Goal 16, the peace goal. The GPI's analysis of statistical capacity (pp. 73-94) motivates a critical question: … Continue reading How Is Public Data Produced?